


Another Way

by deborah_judge



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: Abuse, Family Dynamics, Gen, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 11:28:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13145730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deborah_judge/pseuds/deborah_judge
Summary: Luke had named him, raised him and taught him.  Luke had tried to kill him.  But Vader's path wasn't better.





	Another Way

After Rey leaves him, Kylo goes to his father’s grave. After killing his father he had buried him, somewhere warm, somewhere grassy, somewhere he can visit often to remind himself that his father is dead. But his father wasn’t the one who had named him. Ben, he had been named, Luke’s name for his childhood mentor. Luke had named him, and Luke had raised him, and Luke had stood over him with a saber in his hand.

Kylo doesn’t remember not knowing he was special. Son of a princess and a fighter, nephew and only heir of the galazy’s greatest hero. Star student of his uncle’s academy. Only he had to be the best, because if he wasn’t, it would be shame on his family. And school was stupid. Boring. All that time sitting alone trying to be quiet, trying to make the feelings stop. His feeling weren’t complicated: he missed his mother. He was scared that one day he wouldn’t be the best. But the feelings were his, and he wanted to keep them.

“There’s got to be another way,” he said to Luke, when he was five. 

“There was, once,” Luke said. “My father, Anakin Skywalker, tried to go another way. But it was a bad way, and he hurt people. This is the way that is safe.”

Darth Vader was Kylo’s grandfather, Kylo understood. He could follow in Vader’s path, only Luke didn’t want him to. And Luke was afraid he might. Kylo felt the fear grow over the years, and when Luke had tried to kill him it almost wasn’t a surprise.

“I will destroy the universe to end you,” Kylo says, standing on his father’s grave. He owes nothing to a universe that wouldn’t believe him, that made Luke a hero and left the child he tried to murder nothing but role of a villain. 

He feels his father’s body under the earth. He likes to come here, to remind himself that his father is dead.

*

In dreams, Rey runs through corridors, each turn a door shut in his face. He moves through the doors, easily, he’s not in his body and he’s bound to her so she can’t escape him by running. Finally she stops, faces him. “I said no,” she says. He just stands there, since she can’t make him leave.

When he was a child he had been expected to be the best. Anything else would have been shame, for him and his parents. But now he isn’t the best, and he finds it exhilarating, to be in this room with this girl who bested him and then fought to save his life. In any case his father is dead. 

“I dreamed of you turning,” he says. “Snoke didn’t send that dream. He didn’t send any dreams.” As is obvious, because they are still happening. 

Curiousity overcomes her resistence. “Then who did? Was it you? No…” she continues her own thought, “I can’t do it, so you can’t either. It’s something else.” She looks up. “It’s the Force. It’s in everything, we’re just sensitive to it, and that makes us sensitive to each other.”

“I like that,” he says, and he does. It means that she will always see him, always know him. 

It makes him wonder why Luke had never seen him. But that was, of course, all wrong. Luke had never been trained in the Dark Side. He could see Kylo. He just couldn’t see himself.

*

Kylo still has the Darth Vader mask, smashed as it is, he had worked too hard to find it to let it be completely destroyed. It reminds him that there is another way. Vader found power in anger and in pain. Pain and anger are the truth of Kylo’s life: When he was a child Luke had tried to kill him. 

It wasn’t the saber over his head, or not only. It was that when he tried to tell his fellow students they didn’t believe what he said. Luke was a hero, and kind, they said. He sees the Force that moves between things and would never harm anything that was good. 

There was a fight. He survived, and went off alone into the universe.

Snoke was a different kind of teacher, he didn’t pretend to be kind. In a way it’s kinder when you don’t pretend. Mirrors stretch out in every direction, and maybe you can’t see anyone else but at least you get to know who you are.

*

“I don’t understand the Jedi Order,” Rey says one night. Months go by and she can’t get rid of him, so she seems to be treating him as her imaginary friend. “Feeling the connections between things, I don’t know how you could get an Order out of that. Luke didn’t train in an Order. You did, though. What was it like?”

A nightmare, he almost says, but if he’s her imaginary friend she’s not his. “In the morming we meditated. Then we trained. We didn’t eat very much because we were learning to control ourselves.”

“I wonder where Luke got that from,” Rey says. “It’s not in the books. And he didn't learn that way. He learned like I did, a few sessions from a teacher and then making things up.”

“What is in the books?” Kylo asks. He had never been allowed to read them, that was for those who had been more fully trained.

Rey picks up a book, opens it and reads:  
_Then a woman said, "Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow."_  
_And he answered:_  
_Your joy is your sorrow unmasked._  
_And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears._  
_And how else can it be?_

“That’s it?" Kylo asks.

“There’s more like it,” Rey says. “I don’t know how you’d make an Order out of that. But I suppose I’ll have to, if I’m the last Jedi, I’ll have to figure out how to teach it. But I don’t want to do what Luke did with you, whatever that was.”

“Why not?” Kylo asks. He can feel the answer but he wants her words, he’s hungry for them.

“Because he hurt you,” Rey says, as if it were obvious, as if he hadn’t once burned down a dormitory full of people who wouldn’t believe it.

“ _Rey_ ,” Kylo says with some urgency. “There is another way.” He doesn’t know how to find it. Vader’s path wasn’t better. Snoke wasn’t a better teacher, just more honest. Luke had named him, raised him and taught him. Luke had tried to kill him. 

“I dreamed of you turning,” he says. “You dreamed of me turning. What if neither was a lie?”

*

“I will burn the entire universe to end you,” Kylo says. “I owe nothing to the universe that didn’t believe me when I spoke the truth.” He looks in the mirror and watches himself forward and back. He tries to focus, like he was taught as a child, to open himself to reach out to feel everything around him, to feel the life and death and birth and rebirth and closes his mind when all he feels are screams. But he'll try again. The Light Side teaches you to see others but not yourself, the Dark Side to see yourself but not others. There is another way, and he thinks that maybe with Rey he can find it.

Luke is out there, always a hero, transformed but still alive. Speaking the truth almost feels like burning worlds, but Kylo has actually burned worlds and this is harder. 

He gives the order for his armies to stand down. There is more important work to do, now that his father is dead.

He sleeps, so that he can dream of Rey.

**Author's Note:**

> The quote is from Khalil Gibran's _The Prophet_ , chapter 8 "Joy and Sorrow." The whole book seemed Star Wars appropriate so I'm just going to let it be one of the eight volumes.
> 
> Also, hi. I haven't posted any fanfic in years and years but the movie was inspiring. Also I wanted Rey and Kylo to kiss but because it's me writing they ended up talking about Jedi theology instead. Fortunately, they kiss in many other people's fanfics.


End file.
